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Light, at Thirty-Two -- Michael Blumenthal

(Poem #190)Light, at Thirty-Two
 It is the first thing God speaks of
 when we meet Him, in the good book
 of Genesis. And now, I think
 I see it all in terms of light:
 
 How, the other day at dusk
 on Ossabaw Island, the marsh grass
 was the color of the most beautiful hair
 I had ever seen, or how—years ago
 in the early-dawn light of Montrose Park—
 I saw the most ravishing woman
 in the world, only to find, hours later
 over drinks in a dark bar, that it 
 wasn't she who was ravishing,
 but the light: how it filtered
 through the leaves of the magnolia 
 onto her cheeks, how it turned
 her cotton dress to silk, her walk
 to a tour-jeté.
 
 And I understood, finally, 
 what my friend John meant,
 twenty years ago, when he said: Love
 is keeping the lights on. And I understood 
 why Matisse and Bonnard and Gauguin
 and Cézanne all followed the light:
 Because they knew all lovers are equal
 in the dark, that light defines beauty 
 the way longing defines desire, that 
 everything depends on how light falls 
 on a seashell, a mouth ... a broken bottle.
 
 And now, I'd like to learn
 to follow light wherever it leads me,
 never again to say to a woman, YOU
 are beautiful, but rather to whisper:
 Darling, the way light fell on your hair
 This morning when we woke—God,
 It was beautiful. Because, if the light is right, 
 Then the day and the body and the faint pleasures 
 Waiting at the window ... they too are right.
 All things lovely there. As the first poet wrote,
 in his first book of poems: Let there be light.
 
 And there is.
-- Michael Blumenthal

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